Well, TEPCO is refuting the reporting by the Japanese media of "1,800 millisieverts/hour radiation that would kill in 4 hours", and nowhere in the information TEPCO has made available (in the "email alert to the press" section and "handout for the press" section) does the company even indicate that.

TOKYO — A crisis over contaminated water at Japan’s stricken nuclear plant worsened on Saturday when the plant’s operator said it had detected high radiation levels near storage tanks, a finding that raised the possibility of additional leaks.

The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, said it had found the high levels of radiation at four separate spots on the ground, near some of the hundreds of tanks used to store toxic water produced by makeshift efforts to cool the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s three damaged reactors. The highest reading was 1,800 millisieverts per hour, or enough to give a lethal dose in about four hours, Tepco said.

(Full article at the link)

Bloomberg News Japan, on the other hand, decided to have a Japanese professor at Kinki University declare "1,800 mSv/hour exposure for 4 hours will kill people in 30 days if untreated" in its article on September 2, 2013. I don't know if this article has been translated into English yet. Again, no mention of beta radiation or dose equivalent.

Meanwhile, BBC Radio at least dropped the "lethal in 4 hours" part, and I just heard their news saying the 1,800 mSv/hr radiation is mostly beta radiation and with careful protection the workers could avoid most of exposure.

The Guardian sticks to the meme and says "The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said radiation near the bottom of the tank measured 1,800 millisieverts an hour – high enough to kill an exposed person in four hours."

In the UK, "newspapers of record" are considered to be The Times and The Daily Telegraph.

This shouldn't be surprising because the "news' these days is nothing but echo chamber propaganda, designed to line the pockets of the media corps and benefit the governments and their multinational corporate partners. That is why we have sites like Ex-SKF, which do real reporting the way the 'media'/echo chamber propaganda do not.

" ... Meanwhile, BBC Radio at least dropped the "lethal in 4 hours" part, and I just heard their news saying the 1,800 mSv/hr radiation is mostly beta radiation and with careful protection the workers could avoid most of exposure. ..."

I saw the initial reports and BBC had been saying it was mostly beta radiation from the beginning. Clearly they did not grasp that the beta radiation was not going to be a major hazard.

Lapri we need serious spectroscopic analysis of the caesium in those tanks, so everyone actually knows what the f***ing concentrations are!

TEPCO does have that data, as it's a piece of cake to sample the water and run it through a flame-spectrograph to directly measure the concentration of caesium and other constituents present. It would literally take all of 5 minutes to do it for each tank.

TEPCO needs to stop d*cking us around and just release the concentration data on what's in the tanks, so we all know exactly what the heck we're dealing with, and can evaluate what the real hazard is.

All this fluffing about doses is nonsense when we haven't got a simple list of the sampled concentration for all the solutes within the water in those tanks.

Yes it is HOT, it's fucking very hot and poisonous and believe me, very lethal. Anyone who says is not so bad, even using so-called scientific arguments, is living in fantasy land. Soon enough we will begin to see all kinds of nasty health effects on the Japanese population, and God knows where else.

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

About This Site

Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

Along with commentary on day's financial news, it also provides links to the sites with financial and economic news, market data, stock technical analysis, and other relevant information that could potentially affect the financial markets and beyond.

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